Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries has acquired a 79.4% stake in US PV software developer SenseHawk via a US$32 million investment.
The investment will be used to drive the software company’s growth, ramp up the commercial rollout of its products and increase its research and development (R&D).
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California-based SenseHawk is an early-stage software company that develops management tools for the solar PV industry. Reliance said it would “accelerate solar projects from planning to production by helping companies streamline processes and use automation.”
SenseHawk’s ‘Solar Digital Platform’ offers end-to-end management of solar asset across different stages of project development.
According to the company, its ‘pre-construction evaluation and process optimisation’ enables the aggregation of multiple processes and data into a single GIS-supported view for dashboarding, land data management, design option management and approvals.
Its ‘construction management’ service provides improved communications between project teams, enabling early issue detection and onsite resolution, automated progress reports and connects engineering drawings and schemas to components on site.
Finally, its operations and maintenance (O&M) software “brings all stakeholders to a single interface”, with teams working off of the same map-based tasks, with access to all required data mapped to a digital twin.
So far, the company has been used by more than 140 companies within 15 countries and has supported the development of more than 100GW of solar PV across 600 projects, according to Reliance.
“SenseHawk, along with [Reliance’s] other investments in new energy, will be synergistic and create unique solutions with higher value to customers,” Reliance said in a statement.
“In collaboration with SenseHawk, we will drive down costs, enhance productivity and improve on-time performance to deliver the lowest [levelised cost of energy] for solar projects globally,” said Reliance chairman and managing director, Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest man.
Reliance, which has investments in hydrocarbon exploration and production, petroleum refining and petrochemicals as well as renewables, hopes the acquisition will support its PV project rollout. It is targeting 20GW of installed solar by 2025 and 100GW by 2030.
The company has been laying the groundwork for greater solar deployment by establishing a 10GW solar cell and module factory in Jamnagar, India, which will start production in the module-strapped country by 2024. Recruitment of staff at the site has recently been ramped up.
